Something To THINK About

Thoughts are things; they go somewhere.

[QUOTING]

At the present stage of evolution the majority of the thoughts of men are usually self-centered even when they are not actively selfish. Such self-centered thoughts hang about the thinker. Most men, in fact, surround their mental bodies with a shell of such thoughts. They hover ceaselessly about them and constantly react on them. Their tendency is to reproduce themselves – i.e., to stir up in the man a repetition of the thoughts which he had previously entertained. Many a man feels this pressure upon him from within, this constant suggestion of certain thoughts, especially when he is resting after his labours, and there is no definite thought in his mind. If the thoughts are evil, he frequently thinks of them as tempting demons goading him into sin. Yet they are none the less entirely his own creation; he is his own tempter.

Repeated thoughts of this kind play an important part in working out what is called Prarabda or “ripe” karma. Persistent reiteration of thoughts of the same kind, say of revenge, bring a man at last to a point which may be compared to that of a saturated solution. Just as the addition of further matter of the same kind to the solution will produce the solidification of the whole, so will a slight additional impulse result in the commission of a crime.

Similarly, reiterated thoughts of helping others may, when the stimulus of opportunity touches the man, crystallise out as an act of heroism. Under such circumstances, a man may marvel at his own commission of a crime or at his own performance of some heroic act of self-sacrifice, not realising that repeated thought had made the action inevitable. A consideration of these facts goes far towards explaining the old problem of freewill and necessity or destiny.

Furthermore, a man’s thought-forms tend to draw towards the man the thought-forms of others of a similar nature. A man may thus attract to himself large reinforcements of energy from outside; it lies within himself, of course, whether these forces that he draws into himself be of a good or evil kind.

Usually each definite thought creates a new thought-form; but if a thought-form of the same nature is already hovering round the thinker, under certain circumstances a new thought on the same subject, instead of creating a new form, coalesces with and strengthens the old one, so that by long brooding over the same subject a man may sometimes create a thought-form of tremendous power. If the thought be an evil one, such a thought-form may become a veritable malign influence lasting perhaps for many years, and having for a time all the appearance and powers of a real living entity.

A shell of self-centered thought obviously must tend to obscure the mental vision and facilitate the formation of prejudice. Through such a shell the man looks out upon the world, naturally seeing everything tinged with its predominant colours; everything which reaches him from without is thus more or less modified by the character of the shell. Thus, until a man has complete control of thought and feeling he see nothing as it really is, since all his observations must be made through this medium which, like a badly-made glass, distorts and colours everything.

It was for this reason that Aryasangha [now the Master Djwal Kul] said in The Voice of the Silence that the mind was “the great slayer of the real”. He was drawing attention to the fact that we do not see any object as it is, but only the images that we are able to make of it, everything being thus necessarily coloured for us by these thought-forms of our own creation.

[END QUOTING]

Excerpted from The Mental Body -- A. E. Powell

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